The Little World

When I went to play at Donny’s house I made sure that I went to the bathroom at home first. Even if I didn’t have to go just then.

It wasn’t a problem with dirty toilets – not that at all. That was a school problem, but as long as you didn’t need to do No. 2 while you were there it was something you could cope with. However, Donny’s house was a way different thing.

Donny’s house had Donny’s Mom.

I suppose I should have twigged that something was up when I first went there – Donny was in the basement playing model airplanes, and he showed me how to paint them with Humbrol matte paints. A revelation, as up until then all I had encountered was Revell stuff in bottles; glossy, evil-smelling, and expensive. Humbrol made the Aurora WW1 fighters look real…

But Donny’s room was in the basement. Down the stairs and turn right at the furnace. It wasn’t quite a room – it was a bed in a portion of the basement with shelves around it for his models and a desk. Other bits of the basement were laundry and storage. Next to Donny’s space was a space for his brother, who I never saw.

One day, impelled by the bladder pressure of two orange sodas, I asked if I could use the toilet. Donny escorted me up the stairs into the kitchen and called his Mom. She escorted me down the hall to the toilet, waited outside it until I had finished, and then escorted me back to the basement stairs…

You see, every above-ground surface of Donny’s house was pristine, and covered in clear plastic wrap. Chairs, sofa, lampshades…everthing. There was a clear plastic mat over the carpet in the hallway and I was told to walk down the middle of it and not touch the walls. It was a careful walk, that one bathroom visit.

Apparently Donny’s Mom was divorced and he and his brother lived with her…but she had taken measures to ensure that they did not damage her house…I knew that it was odd, and I suspected why, but it was not until I came to Western Australia as a uni student and saw the same pattern at a house next door to my girlfriend’s that I was confirmed in those suspicions. It was the clear vinyl plastic wrap on the furniture that defined it.